Echoes (from Indian Ocean)

The Indian Ocean often evokes fantasized visions of exotic dreams. Far from postcards clichés, Malala Andrialavidrazana brings us discreetly into private spheres in Antananarivo, Mumbai, Durban and Reunion Island, and presents the viewer with day-to-day atmospheres, still-lives and fragmented portraits with elegance and subtlety.

She is driven by the diversity of those communities and how identities are expressed in a world of mass communication and where uniformity leaves its mark on people.

Playing with boundaries in general and more particularly with the passages existing between anthropology, contemporary art and architecture, she explores the authenticity and intimacy of the middle classes in the urban areas on the Indian Ocean.

d’Outre-Monde

Malala Andrialavidrazana presents a photographic study of funerary customs around the world, with photographs taken from an extensive corpus of over seven thousand shots taken during an expedition to South America, Asia and Oceania in 2003.

Her interest in burial grounds was initially prompted by studies in architecture. She sees the burial grounds as a powerful expression of a community's ties to a particular location, "revealing a great deal about the identity of a society and the individuals that compose it."

In a world of growing uniformity, dominated by mass communication, she sees cemeteries as a reassuring sign of ongoing diversity in cultural heritage.

Carol BrownArtistic advisor 2004 for the HSBC Foundation for Photography

“It’s not about systematically representing the correlations between the specific features of a culture and its cult of the dead. It is sufficient to have a quick glimpse of the photos to see that they are not trying to create an inventory, a disordered classification of cemeteries of which the criteria was pre-established. Here, the eventualities, the coincidence of walking around, the journey and the encounter have been the rule. The originality of Malala’s process can be found in her fond regard for the contemporary citizens, since this is the type of inversion or reversal that constitutes the cemetery. The unity of people is pictured throughout all of these images.”